Swept up in a beachcomber gold rush on P.E.I.’s terracotta beaches, we prospect feverishly for the mighty sand dollar with one ‘buck’ already in the bank— while up ahead, a gull bullies a hapless crab, savaging it with her jabbing beak, yanking it, flipping it onto its back in a stark wild-kingdom cinéma verité…

And then, mouthful of appendages clamped like clothespins in her billand bomb-laden with the cumbersome cargo, she lumbers herself airborne…where, at an altitude of twenty feet, some of the string-bean, plastic, Legoslegs pop their joints and then... it's 'Bombs away!' for our little Buster Crabwho bounces off the beach-head below with a carapace-jarring thump! Whereupon this gull, this Jackie the Ripperess, this Angel of Death, descends with deadly finality upon her victim’s now much-handicapped gesticulations-- when… “Here I come to save the day! That meansthat Mighty Mouse is on the way!”

Later, cradled in my cupped palms, our reclaimed-but-crippled crustacean bogarts me his best grimace, a wink, a tip of the hat, a brave thumbs-up… and then with a ker-plunk, I sink him like a stone back into the safety of the salty surf to live another day to regale his future grandcrabs with his tall tale of the fantastic flight over the sand